"You Are What You Eat"

I took as a starting point the title of the assignment, "You Are What You Eat." To me, the title implied some sort of autobiography. If form follows function, I wanted to find the food that would be most appropriate to serve as a kind of edible autobiography. Some of my earliest memories involve cooking pancakes with my dad and grandma, so I chose pancakes as my base recipe. In thinking of how to utilize the material (pancake batter) I thought of the "Mickey Mouse pancakes" I sometimes ate as a kid, and decided to explore the possibilities of portraiture (of family members as a way to relate the project to the idea of (self)-portraiture) through pancake batter. The idea to "draw" with lines of burnt pancake batter came to me as I was falling asleep. The process of actually drawing (paintbrush vs. pastry bag, batter consistency, pan heat) required several hours of trial and error, but once I figured out a system, things went relatively smoothly.

I liked the challenge of the project-- of creating a piece of art that uses food as a material-- and through a process of experimentation I developed a process that I may want to explore further in the future.